HOPper shut off the light as his mistress left the kitchen, scrubbing at her eyes while she made her way down the hallway to the bedrooms. Just as Vanessa reached the girls’ door, he dimmed the hall light from the standard eight hundred lumens to th…

I guess it started with the robot talking to me at the front of Perfect Pizza. It was the check-out clerk, one of the humanoid ones, vaguely male with his square features, bald head and glass eyes. via Pocket

It seemed impossible that the war had left a single thing untouched. And yet, here she was, familiar boards creaking under her bare feet, familiar smell of hotcakes and burnt coffee wafting from the kitchen. And in front of her, corn swayed in the s…

Peter Carlson held the gurgling two-month-old infant with one hand, while the other dug through a dresser drawer. “Bwa! Bah!” gurgled the baby. “Right as usual, Cassie,” Peter said, pulling out a b…

It moved forward in a crawl, jagged angles flowing over soil and stone alike, dawn shaping shadow and sun into beaks and talons that moved relentless toward her boot and over it. With a touch of he…

The arrival of delegates from the Planetary Migration Program raised false hope in my district. Not only has the maximum age for entry to the off-world colony been lowered, we were given less than a week to prepare a concept to prove worth of passag…

The oven door creaks open, revealing the grimy, sweat-tracked face of a girl just past her seventh birthday. Opening an oven from the inside is difficult for a child, but Drea Kane has had practice. She crawls into the unfamiliar house and dusts off…

Whispers from the Jewish quarter about the raising of a golem. A clock where every hour Death pursued sins and set them quaking. Astronomy, botany, art. Bohemia in the days of Rudolf II was famed f…

“Chancellor, it’s Zend, at the University. One of your research students. I think you should come and see something.” The voice on the other end of the line was groggy. The Chancellor didn’t bother…

I let Cameron take me to him, but I already knew where he was. I smelled him as clearly as I smelled old Barty’s woodsmoke. He had a bad scent. Sweet and sick, like rotting flowers. “Did you touch …

“After just one year, undrafted rookie Moses Abebe has taken the league by storm, becoming the first player in NBA history to make every shot in a single season…” “Moses Abebe continues to dominate…

“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked, her voice thick and opium-drowsy, the slight thaw of early spring making her as lazy as the white-hot sun of high summer makes the old cows in th…

“Thank you for registering with NamMo.com, America’s #1 personalized munitions retailer…” The message arrived at 8:46 a.m. Andy was fixing his coffee for the drive to work when the alert dinged. He…

By the time her husband came downstairs, Miranda was nearly frantic trying to find a kill switch for the nanny. “Katie got herself eaten over the weekend,” she said without looking up, her fingers …

The new word seemed somehow old-fashioned. Halfsies. Like how Tariq’s sun-shrunken, onetime surfer grandfather would say “rad” when he deemed some event or circumstance especially good. Halfsies, a…

I extended my hand out the window, reaching as my mother had taught me since I was old enough to understand her words. Palm up, an invitation to the distant skies. The steppe ended in the distance,…

The white stone buildings of the city gleam like scattered pearls, their peaks and towers reaching for the vertiginous blue of the sky. Atop the spires and turrets and minarets, domes and curlicues…

Jareth eased into a parking spot, turning off the rock ‘n’ roll screaming from the radio. The wind nipped at his skin, so he zipped up his jacket a little tighter. His silver necklace winked at him…

Despair and Ecstasy are the simplest. Ecstasy is the small and cozy room of a cottage that looks out on a broad meadow in the forest. In the spring, elk come to posture and to mate, and the wildflo…

“Can I get five for fifteen?” an old man said. Jerome looked up from the sidewalk and into the old man’s eyes. Junior was a local; he’d grown up two houses down the street, though he didn’t live th…

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Resten Light woke up, pushed the fibre blanket away, and pulled apart the two wings that formed the doors of his nest. He took in the immense sky, its colour and its shapes. Clouds coalesced around…

Black flowers carpeted the floor that morning, cloaking the bedroom in funeral colors. Their petals, large as my hand and soft as suede, belonged to no plant I could name. The salt and midnight sme…

So there we are, in the venerable Rat King Tavern, on La Isla de los Diablos Perdidos (Lost Devils Island to you English-speakers), somewhere deep in the Emerald Sea, and it’s me and One-Handed Car…

It was after summer that Nora started to sink. Just footsteps a little deeper than usual; she saw them as she came back on her walk, comparing her outgoing, energetic pace to her homecoming, philos…

I didn’t actually want a dog, so I guess I got what I wanted. The little guy belonged to my grandma. I don’t know many old ladies, but I still feel confident saying that she was a very cool old lad…

Nikki shook the can and sprayed again, trailing a long, jagged streak of crimson paint to the far end of the wall until the contents came to a sputtering halt. He stepped back to the crowded sidewa…

Erik was balanced atop one of the standing stones on the black pebble beach when the elders told him of his father’s death. Drowned, they said. Out at Sampson Fjord. Killed by Old Blue. Darkn…

It’s a cold, hopeless wind that blows across the Southern Seas on these winter nights. Blade-edge gusts skim the waves; paper lanterns swing from the rigging, and the merchandise below decks strain…

My favorite place to practice the cello will always be the observatory. My friend Jamie, an astronomer, first let me in one day when the sun was up and visibility was nil. I practiced for hours und…